Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has reached an incredible $18 billion settlement with 48 states that accused the tech giant of knowingly causing harm to children — and parents who blame their teens’ suicides on social media are celebrating.
“It feels like vindication,” said Victoria Hinks, whose daughter, Owl, was 16 when she took her own life in 2024. Hinks was at the US District Court for the Northern District of California, near Silicon Valley, when the settlement was announced Wednesday morning.
“I feel like Owl was there.”
Hinks said her daughter, who grew up in Marin County, Calif., developed such an intense addiction to Instagram and TikTok that the family took the door off her bedroom to prevent late-night scrolling.
After the girl’s death, Hinks said, she opened Owl’s phone and found content related to eating disorders, depression, self-harm and suicide. She believes this algorithmically derived feed contributed to her daughter’s death.
“I’m hoping that the settlement hurts Meta a little bit,” she said. “I hope that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t just think that this is the cost of doing business. It’s not all about money but, unfortunately, that’s the only language they understand.”
The settlement put an end to an ongoing federal trial and saw Meta also agree to make changes to how its platforms work for minors.
The company is introducing a two-hour daily time limit, turning off access to its apps at night as a default, stopping all notifications during school hours, giving parents new control mechanisms and sending a message to teens every 15 minutes of continuous use.
The company is also urging “industry-wide commitments,” and specifically called on TikTok and YouTube to make similar moves.
It’s still not enough for heartbroken parents.
“I don’t think there are enough commas and zeros in this settlement figure — but that’s coming from me as a mom that has had over 2,000 days without my daughter,” Lori Schott of Merino, Colo., told The Post.
Her daughter Annalee was an 18-year-old high school senior when she died by suicide in November 2020, after years of habitually using platforms including Instagram.
After Annalee died, her mother went through her phone and, according to court documents, found a barrage of content “telling her that she wasn’t good enough.”
“Tonight was one of the worst nights I’ve had in a while,” Annalee wrote months before she took her own life. “I was sitting on my bathroom floor telling myself how much I hated myself. Nobody is going to love me unless I look the part. I look at other girls’ profiles and it makes me feel worse.”
Schott found out about Wednesday’s settlement when her son called her and said, “Mom, you guys did it.” She’d been part of a group camping outside the California courthouse as a jury heard another victorious case, brought by an anonymous young woman known as KGM, against Meta and Google earlier this year.
“I’ll never think it’s enough until we as parents that lost kids know that the world is a safer place in this digital space,” Schott said. “Today was like losing [Annalee] all over again … These changes could have saved my daughter’s life if they would have implemented them earlier.”
Matthew Bergman, an attorney who represented KGM and is the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, told The Post that Meta’s changes to how minors use the platforms are “not an epiphany on the road to Damascus.
“Let’s be clear. These changes were recommended by Meta’s internal trust and safety people for years,” he said. “They are major steps in the right direction. There’s still a long way to go.”
Erin Popolo of South Brunswick, NJ, agrees. She lost her daughter, Emily, to suicide at just 17 after the girl was allegedly cyber-bullied on Snapchat and Instagram.
“It’s bittersweet because we do want [Meta] held accountable — that’s what we’ve been asking for this whole time. But it doesn’t bring back our children,” Popolo told The Post.
She said anonymous bullies — one of whom has been identified as a classmate — took a photo of Emily during the pandemic at her Target job wearing a hairnet mask, and apron and made cruel comments about her weight and appearance.
Emily asked her mom for help taking down the anonymously posted images, but Popolo claimed the family’s attempts to contact Instagram and report the images proved fruitless.
The bullying became so severe, Popolo said, that Emily took her own life in January 2021. One of her alleged bullies then infiltrated the girl’s funeral service on Zoom and threatened to blow up the funeral home, while the whole family watched helplessly.
For Popolo, the settlement doesn’t stop the pain. “They’re getting away with literal murder, if you ask me, at $18 billion,” she said.
But Kathleen Spence, whose daughter filed a lawsuit against Meta in 2022 for allegedly causing her mental health troubles, believes Meta’s moves represent real, substantive change.
“This settlement is beyond money — it’s power to the parents,” she told The Post. Her daughter, Alexis, now 24, started graduate school Wednesday for applied behavior analysis, hoping she can help other kids navigate the complexities of growing up online. “Today is a day that we honor the memories of the children who have been lost or harmed because of social media.”
The Post reached out to Meta for comment. Previously, the company did not respond to requests for comment on the Schott, Spence and Hinks cases.
“All platforms should empower parents and support teens in these ways because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another,” Meta said in a statement about the settlement and its associated changes. “For meaningful progress to happen, we urge our peers to join us.”
While the settlement puts an end to the consolidated state cases brought by various attorneys general, Meta still has much litigation ahead of it, largely in the form of several private cases brought by the families of social media victims. And New Mexico and Florida did not settle and still have ongoing cases.
“We’re never going to stop fighting this way for our kids because we have nothing left to lose,” Hinks said.
